Tucson Lit: The Forest in the Seeds

Milkweed seed pod, Blue Jay Farm, Missouri. October 2010.

The real Wild Kingdom is as small and brown as a wren, as tedious as a squirrel turning back the scales of a pine cone to capture its seeds, as quiet as a milkweed seed on the wind - the long, slow stillness between takes. This, I think, is the message in the bottle from Thoreau, [in Faith in a Seed] the man who noticed a clump of seeds caught in the end of a cow's whisking tail ...

Source: Barbara Kingsolver, The Forest in the Seeds, from her 1995 book of essays, High Tide in Tucson.

Seed pod, Ha Ha Tonka State Park, Missouri. October 2010.

... As a nation we will never defer to the endangered spotted owl .... until we are much more widely educated. But the things we will have to know -  concepts of food chain, habitat, selection pressure and adaptation, and the ways all species depend on others - are complex ideas that just won't fit into a thirty-second spot. Evolution can't be explained in a sound bite.

Barbara Kingsolver

Curled seed pod, Alamogordo, New Mexico. July 2013.

Even well-intentioned educational endeavors like carefully edited nature films, and the easy access to exotic animals offered by zoos, are tailored to our impatience. They lead us to expect nature will be all storm and no lull. It's a dangerous habit. Natural history writer Robert Michael Pyle asks: 'If we can watch rhinos mating in our living rooms, who's going to notice the wren in the back yard'?

Barbara Kingsolver

Magnolia fruit, Opelousas, Louisiana. October 2015.

Related posts

• Tucson Lit: High Tide in Tucson
• Tucson Lit: Creation Stories
• Tucson Lit: The Forest in the Seeds

Tucson Lit: Creation Stories

Rain over Alamogordo, New Mexico. July 2013.

The quotes in this post are by Barbara Kingsolver, from her essay, Creation Stories, which I found in her collection of essays called High Tide in Tucson. Ms. Kingsolver lived in Tucson for more than 20 years.

I haven't experienced yet the monsoons of Tucson, but I've had a taste in New Mexico and El Paso, such as here, here, and here.

I feel as if I have front-and-center seats for the coming natural theater this summer. I can hardly wait. 


From Ms. Kingsolver:  

Man and Woman rain

June is the crudest month in Tucson ... This is the season when every living thing in the desert swoons south toward some faint salt dream of the Gulf of Mexico: tasting the horizon, waiting for the summer storms. ... The birds are pacing the ground stiff-legged, panting .. Waiting. .... Every plant looks pitiful and, when you walk past it, moans a little, envious because you can walk yourself to a drink and it can't. 

 

Rain over Alamogordo, New Mexico. July 2013.

The water that came last winter is long gone. 'Female rain,' it's called in Navajo: the gentle, furtive rains that fall from overcast skies between November and March. .... In June there is no vital sign, not so much as a humid breath against a pane of glass, till the summer storms arrive. What we're waiting for now is male rain. Big, booming, wait-till-your-father-gets-home cloudbursts that bully up from Mexico and threaten to rip the sky. 

Rain over Alamogordo, New Mexico. July 2013.

We revel in our misery [of June] only because we know the end, when it comes, is so good. One day there will be a crackling, clean creosote smell in the air and the ground will be charged and the air on your arms will stand on end and BOOM, you are thrillingly drenched. All the desert toads crawl out of their burrows, swell out their throat, and scream for sex while the puddles last. The ocotillos leaf out before your eyes, like a nature show on fast forward.

 

Octotillos, UTEP, El Paso, Texas. April 2017.

There is so little time before the water sizzles back to thin air again. So little time to live a whole life in the desert. This is elemental mortality, the root of all passion.

Source: Barbara Kingsolver

Related posts

• Tucson Lit: High Tide in Tucson
• Tucson Lit: Creation Stories
• Tucson Lit: The Forest in the Seeds

Tucson Lit: High Tide in Tucson

White Sands, pink dusk, at White Sands National Monument, New Mexico. September 2013.

If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.

The above quote is by Barbara Kingsolver, from her essay, High Tide in Tucson, in her collection of essays by the same title. She tells the story about a hermit crab that became an accidental stowaway on her return from a Caribbean vacation to her desert home in Tucson.

Ms. Kingsolver and her daughter enfolded "Buster" into their family, where he practiced his peculiar-to-them ways.

I wasn't aware that Barbara Kingsolver made Tucson her home for two decades.

I loved the complex texture of her novel, The Poisonwood Bible, which I read many years ago.

But that's not the first memory that comes to mind when I think of Ms. Kingsolver.

Instead, I think immediately of my former colleague, Jessica Terrell.

Hours before Jessica died in a car crash, Jessica shared her admiration for Ms. Kingsolver's work with a co-worker at the New Mexico Department of Natural Resources.

I might amend Ms. Kingsolver's quote to read: "When someone extraordinary shows up in your life, you cherish that encounter, whether it be short-lived or long."

Jessica was extraordinary, and she is inextricably linked in my mind to Barbara Kingsolver.

It is my good fortune to have met a goodly number of extraordinary women and men.

I could say that I make a soft and warm home for each of these souls in my house of memories. I visit them in their rooms there. I sit on their plush, downy beds and I reminisce with them about what they have given me in their words or deeds about how to live richly, even with tragedies.

I smile as I remember.



Related posts

• Tucson Lit: High Tide in Tucson
• Tucson Lit: Creation Stories
• Tucson Lit: The Forest in the Seeds